Tag Archives: Django Reinhardt

The theme of the 2018 UK Disability History Month (19 November-22 December) is Music. I am delighted to have been invited to speak at the national launch, in Parliament (Portcullis House) on Monday 19 November. My topic is jazz and disability.

There is a useful and free downloadable resource about music and disability produced by UKDHM, here. This draws quite extensively on my research on the subject over the past decade. Also, below, for further reference, is the bibliography of my forthcoming chapter, ‘Jazz and disability.’

[From the end of my short talk] At its best, we can think of jazz as a generous, inclusive form which has wanted and been able to accommodate the differently embodied or minded, because jazz was capable of flexibility and sought novelty, and because jazz was a music forged in the experience of oppression, resistance and liberation. In its concern with the individual voice of expression, its fetish of the desire for the musically unique in tone or approach, jazz was open and welcoming to those who could, as Laurie Stras has put it, ‘sing a song of difference’ (2009).

This embrace of its inner crip was there in the fundamentals of the music—its freak noises and effects, its syncopated rhythms that are alla zoppa, its out-of-control dancing body, its acceptance of alternate techniques or voices. And—this is Disability History Month, after all—the embrace of its inner crip is also there in jazz music’s history and innovation, from the very start, in the United States (Buddy Bolden) as well as in Europe (Django Reinhardt).